On January 2, the president called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. Various states seemed to carry various levels of immediacy and insult in Trump’s mind. He had won Pennsylvania by 1,000,000 votes … only to see the Democrats produce an extra 1,000,080 votes before his eyes (this was more Trump mantra: “If I wake up in the morning and they say I’m ahead by 100,000 votes, they find 100,001 votes more”). Obviously, he had been done wrong in Arizona, in Maricopa County. But Georgia, especially, whose governor he had come specifically to blame, preyed on him.

In part because of its singular importance to Trump and in part because Georgia was included in his own southern base, Meadows had made Georgia, as he had made North Carolina on Election Night, his pet project. This was also because he distrusted Giuliani. Meadows made Cleta Mitchell the lawyer on point. “I don’t want Rudy doing anything with Georgia. He’ll just screw it up. Cleta is in charge. Rudy doesn’t do anything there” was the Meadows instruction.

Meadows, out of a sense of duty toward the president but with his feet still in the real world, had wound himself up into such contortions and rationalizations and redefinitions and subcategorizations of the issues involved with the election challenge that his incoherence might have allowed the president to think they were making the same argument. Perhaps Meadows thought so too.

Still, it is almost impossible to imagine what Meadows, the reasonably astute politician and now-experienced Trump handler, and Mitchell, the seven-figure partner in a blue-chip law firm, thought they could get out of calling the Georgia secretary of state for help in the election challenge. How could they not have seen certain trouble in the prospect of the president of the United States lobbying a state official to interfere in an election? But indeed, they idly listened as Trump seemed to try to coax, with his heavy-pressure, wheedling voice, Raffensperger to find new votes for him.